After making inappropriate comments to his group before a Ligue 1 match to justify the tenure of a player prosecuted for sexual assault, Abdel Bouhazama resigned. The now ex-coach of Angers had been in office since the end of November.
The passage of Abdel Bouhazama in Angers will not be remembered on the sporting level. But his departure should mark the SCO club for a long time. The 54-year-old coach, who arrived at the end of November to take the place of Gérald Baticle, resigned from his post on Tuesday March 7, as the Angevin club announced in a press release published in the afternoon.
This decision is the result first of all of a controversy that has swelled around the SCO and Bouhazama for a few hours, following comments made by the coach to his players before a match against Montpellier, Sunday in Ligue 1. To justify the tenure of Ilyes Chetti, an SCO player accused of sexual assault on a young girl in a nightclub, Bouhazama made inappropriate remarks to his workforce.
“He said, ‘It’s not mean, we’ve all touched girls before’. We were all shocked, without reaction to something like this”reported a player to The Team, who unveiled the content of the Angevin coach’s pre-match speech on Tuesday. “Faced with media pressure and to preserve the club’s image and the serenity of the locker room, Abdel Bouhazama announced to President Saïd Chabane that he had decided to leave his position as coach of the professional team.“, writes the SCO of Angers in its press release.
Bad sports results
The Angevin club, bottom of Ligue 1 with ten points behind Troyes (19th), also specifies that “this eventuality (of a resignation) was imagined by Abdel Bouhazama for several days and that the decision as to his withdrawal from the first team was thought by the person concerned during the end of February after several disappointments on the sports plan.“
This is the other reason that pushed Bouhazama to resign: since his arrival at the head of the team at the end of November, he has not been able to raise the bar and has not won a single match in Ligue 1. “I think it’s dead”, had launched Bouhazama concerning the possibility for Angers to remain in the elite, after the heavy defeat in Montpellier on Sunday (0-5). The SCO will now have to find a third coach during a nightmarish season.
In its press release, the Angevin club “unreservedly condemns the words spoken during the talk” by Bouhazama, while adding that it is “clumsiness” and was “taken out of context“. His words have provoked many reactions in recent hours, including that of the Sports Assistant of the Angers town hall and former SCO player, Charles Diers: “A Ligue 1 coach cannot speak like that. An educator cannot speak like that. A man should not say such things.”
“We are grateful to him for his efforts, even if these did not pay off, and we will see with him how he now sees his future.“, writes the SCO in its press release. Successively responsible for training, director of the training center, coach of the U19s then of the B team, Bouhazama is a former member of the Angevin club where he has worked for almost ten years. His future within the SCO is more uncertain than ever.